Review of the noir detective series Sugar

Colin Farrell plays a private detective named John Sugar in the modern noir series Sugar by Apple TV+ about a vicious Los Angeles in which the altruistic dinosaur selflessly does good everywhere and to everyone who deserves it. Classic American noirs not only figuratively but literally come to life on the pages, i.e. in the frames of this atypical, contrary to all current trends, old-fashioned show that sounds like a saxophone soundtrack, speaks in an internal monologue and looks at us, the audience, from under a hat, even without a hat, like a mysterious gloomy silhouette from an old painted poster.

In the story, a mysterious private investigator, who does not reveal his background and certainly has dark secrets, returns to the city of sins to be a kind of… angel among this vice. From time to time he is tormented by an illness as mysterious as he is, making his hands tremble, his body disobey, and his guilt over his sister’s death. But despite his own pain and reflections, John Sugar persists in trying to make this bleak world, or at least this bleak city, better, even if it is only by small, local steps. And even if one random homeless person has a penny to spend the night with his mongrel dog on this dark night (darker than a dark day), then John Shugar’s day was not in vain.

And although his manager is categorically against it, the hero agrees to take on a new case, namely to find the missing granddaughter of a legendary Hollywood producer (James Cromwell), because, firstly, Sugar loves his films and is a maniacal moviegoer in general, and secondly, the sad girl in the photo strongly reminds him of his dead sister Intuition or experience or transcendental feeling, or both, tell the protagonist that something is definitely wrong with this seemingly trivial matter (the girl is a former drug addict, so she could easily have snapped and ended up in a brothel) and with this supposedly respectable celebrity family. And when Sugar, having read the missing woman’s feminist social media posts about the struggle for women’s rights, finds her car and the corpse of her rapist in the trunk, her suspicions are obviously confirmed

Sugar doesn’t try to rephrase or modernize the aesthetics and attributes of classic noir, it gives it a gentle, respectful, almost head over heels in love, reverent vintage touch. And Los Angeles deliberately appears as a place where time is not guessed by gadgets or fashion, that is, the distinctive features of the era are not striking but blurred in the out-of-focus. So, perhaps the only thing that distinguishes this series from a number of plot and stylistic characteristics of the canonical film noir is the feminist instead of la femme fatale.

In fact, the plot intrigue here is much less exciting (especially in the moments when the detective fog is spoiled by a different style and color, namely, the veil of somewhat satirical espionage, because the hero turns out to be a member of the so-called Cosmopolitan Polyglot Community, under which former agents who decided to atone for their past professional sins by pure selfless charity are hiding) than the style and image of the protagonist. Quite simple narrative twists and turns give way to a more complex and thoughtful, and aesthetically and intellectually intelligent comparison of the scenes and events that take place around John Sugar with scenes from Double Indemnity or The Big Sleep (by the way, as befits a noir detective or a noir protagonist in general, Sugar does not sleep well and has depressive nightmares). Almost every thought he says out loud is illustrated by a suitable episode of a movie with Humphrey Bogart, Burt Lancaster, Glenn Ford… And this cinephile only overcomes his pacifist convictions when he gets a rare revolver (not the same one, but the same film prop) from Fritz Lang’s noir The Great Heat.

Colin Farrell, who used to portray Irish plebeians so often, flawlessly transforms into the elegant figure of Mr. X, or should we say Humanist X. While almost all modern detectives offer us eccentric, egotistical, cynical, reclusive, misanthropic, bizarre, satirical, critical, skeptical, apostate detectives…Sugar shares this antique and relic, this knight in a black exquisite suit, who, like Steve “Captain America” Rogers, is sick with archaic rudimentary nobility and kindness, but without a shield, spandex, and mask.